Lost Leaders, Perplexed Project Managers, and Trampled Team Members

The other day while preparing for an interview with Fortune Magazine, a junior colleague asked, "When recovering a failing project, what are the role differences for various people in the organization?" Great question! I had never sat down and captured that aspect of project recovery. After all, failed projects are a hodgepodge of lost leaders, perplexed project managers, and trampled team members. Without defining everyone's roles early and continually refining those roles, you will struggle establishing calm in what is otherwise a very stressful situation.

Want to read more?

Projects take more than managers, they need leaders. Leading is a special set of skills that one needs to hone and develop. We have numerous white papers on the topic. One, Transforming Project Managers Into Project Leaders talks specifically about what a PM must do to become a leader.

Order To The Approach

To discuss the topic with her I drew a table (see inset) on one of my white boards. It was quite enlightening. It ended up that there was a priority in how a recovery manager would utilize the team.

There are three layers to this onion. In order of application, they are direction, effectiveness, and efficiency. Direction imbues the vision to the team and ensures people are working on the "right thing." Effectiveness is the act of actually doing work and getting the desired results. By setting direction first, you have a level of confidence that the tasks people are working on are the right ones. Hence, effectiveness follows direction. Once the team's operations are tuned and they are following the right processes, then technology's efficiency will be a benefit. Never start by adding tools to make something more efficient. It will only amplify the bad things you are doing.

Lost Leader

Lost leaders regain their footing by resorting to the basic principles of leadership—defining vision, making decisions, and motivating the team. Faced with a disaster on their watch, they are probably struggling to regain footing. Get them focused on vision. Without defining what the project is going, it will never deliver value. Help them make decisions by working with the team members to get objective data. These two actions alone will set the foundation for re-building energetic, cooperative, and focused culture.

Perplexed Project Manager

Project managers are only perplexed if they follow a methodology as if it were a dogma. Project managers are facilitators that have hundreds or thousands to tools in their toolbox. They coordinate and prioritize thousands of pieces of data to ensure projects deliver value. This means that they must adapt to the multitude of changes in any project. They cannot try control change; rather, they must manage it allowing it to flow logically within the time and cost constraints. As a conduit, they drive direction from leadership to the team and distill information from the team to leadership.

Trampled Team Member

Gravity works—everything flows downhill. Frontline troops, whose primary responsibility is to build the product, take the brunt of everything that is wrong in the project. The accelerations, the right-angle turns, the stops, the starts, and, unfortunately, all too often, the blame for the projects woes are constantly whipsawing a troubled project's team. These are the people, though, that must take the new direction and deliver value from it. Ensure they know how they are involved in the recovery. They have the information on what is right and wrong. They will provide the data for decisions and in turn tell you how new decisions will affect the outcomes. They simply need to be asked for the information and have the new vision and decisions explained. Given that respect, they will deliver you the value.

Utilizing Your Entire Team

When rebuilding a project, or for that matter an organization, utilizing the entire team is paramount. Too often, we only focus on a small subset of the team and forget that everyone needs direction. Just the action of asking them what they think is wrong starts rebuilding the already wounded team. Everyone has something to contribute to the recovery and it is incumbent on the leader to engage them in the recovery. Engage and lead your team and success will be a lot closer.

Related items

45% of middle managers cannot name one of the top five corporate goals.

64% of cross department/functional issues are poorly resolved.

And maybe as you could expect from this:

53% of companies cannot react timely to new opportunities.

You do not need to be a rocket scientist to know that this trajectory is not going to launch most companies’ latest strategic plans successfully. In fact, these data might make you feel that middle management would be better suited as test dummies for the next generation of manned space-vehicle. Granted, the data show there is a dearth of leadership in middle management, but executive tier has a culpable hand.

Process is at the core of any business. It makes work predictable, repeatable, and transferable. Without it we cannot scale our businesses. However, process can be a bane to making progress. Processes that work for a $10 million company have difficulties supporting a $30 million company. Trying to scale them to a $300 million company will not only fail but not address the issues that larger companies have that were never dreamt of in a smaller organization. Processes need to be discarded, revamped, and built—all of that without creating an overburdening bureaucracy.

Anytime you need to go someplace, you first have to know where you are. Processes are never static and your company's current state is probably far from where you think it is. Hence, the first step is mapping out you company's current state followed by defining the future state. This is more than a logical map of the process; it must also include physical maps. Whether your process is solely to provide a service (say, website development) or physical (say, manufacturing) there are logistical issues that complicate the process flow. Without fully understanding those nuances, future state processes will not reach the desired efficiencies.

For more information about process mapping fill out the form to the left and we will get in touch with you.

The other day a Latvian student contacted me for my views the connection between culture and success criteria—an important and intriguing topic. After working in Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Israel, United States, and Canada, I wear many scars of both blatant and subtle cultural violations. I also know that within a culture one person's success is often another person's failure. So, after dispelling concerns about clicking on some random email link, I completed her survey (please feel free to take it yourself). In the process, I struck up a friendship with the student, Kristine Briežkalne, who is studying at Riga International School of Economics and Business Administration . She has some interesting views and presented me with a Venn diagram showing four frames to a project (business, client, project management, and growth perspectives) and how they intersected. As the diagram is part of her Master's thesis, I will let you ponder the how to label the overlapping areas (an eye-opening exercise).

There is a reason we do not teach classes on fixing failing projects. Many a cynic feels that we simply do not want to teach our trade, however, our reason is far nobler—we should be teaching prevention rather trying to create white knights to save the day. It is the same philosophy as building a fence at the cliff's edge rather than an emergency room at its base. Our language is replete with idioms telling us to look past the symptom and address problems at their root cause. 'An ounce of prevention versus a pound of cure' or 'a stitch in time saves nine.' Please, feel free to supply your own in the comments. Unfortunately, most of our businesses loathe this philosophy, waiting to address an issue until it is irrefutably broken.

It was such an innocuous question, "Working on an article; what is the biggest problem you see with project governance at orgs? Can you comment?" Can I comment? Really? That is like cheese to a mouse. Where could I start—bureaucracy, draconian process, poor executive sponsorship, disengaged leaders? Plenty of fodder, because they all lead to project failure. I fired off, "Creating an over bureaucratic morass stifling innovation & implementing process instead of cultivating leaders." Then the maelstrom started and it went directly to the gap between the executives and projects managers. Naomi Caietti, Robert Kelly and I had a great conversation. Most of the thread is below.